Hannity And Bozell Throw Stones At Media Matters From The Very Thin Walls Of Their Glass House

Those perpetual victims, Sean Hannity and Brent Bozell, predictably used the Hannity show’s weekly liberal-media-bias whine session last night to attack Media Matters in the wake of Daily Caller hit pieces on it this week. But the whine session was a cornucopia of distortions, hypocrisy and, most of all, distractions. Neither Hannity nor Bozell offered up a single Media Matters report that was false. In short, Hannity and Bozell were every bit as guilty of media malpractice as they accused anyone else of being.

Hannity and Bozell spoke about some kind of Media Matters “enemies list.” But that is not what The Daily Caller reported. The Daily Caller supposedly got hold of an email from a former Media Matters staffer to his boss targeting Fox News as the enemy and offering suggestions about how to proceed in that vein – including hiring private investigators to look into the lives of Fox News personnel. But there was no information presented – either by Daily Caller or the Hannity show - that any of those suggestions were ever implemented or even seriously considered at any higher level. In fact, near the end of the segment last night, Hannity noted that no personal dope seems to have been uncovered. For all we know that former staffer was fired on the spot for having made such a suggestion.

Hannity sneered, “Their main role as a non-profit is basically to obliterate and destroy – politics of personal destruction, people whose opinion they don’t agree with.”

Hannity hopped to another distortion, as he accused Media Matters of “writing their (MSNBC’s) prime time lineup. What was actually reported was that the Daily Caller source said Media Matters “basically write(s)” the MSNBC prime time script. The Daily Caller article was pretty clear that what was meant was that MSNBC bases a lot of its prime time discussion on Media Matters research.

And what’s so different about that and, say, the endless Fox News segments on the “research” by Andrew Breitbart’s undercover videographers into ACORN? Unlike BreitbartandCo., Media Matters’ work has not been discredited. Not even Hannity or Bozell mentioned a single untruth reported by MMFA.

Instead, Bozell uttered yet another untruth as he attempted to argue that Media Matters took issue with Fox News' conservative commenters and found no bias in its "straight reporting," He said, “They (Media Matters) don’t talk about Bret Baier… they don’t talk about the news, they talk about the commentators.”

Without a trace of irony, Bozell said, “They can’t fight us fairly, they can’t go mano a mano with us on ideas so they have to hire private detectives… to see how they can destroy us that way.”

That’s pretty funny – not just because Bozell and Hannity systematically ignored Media Matters’ ideas in order to destroy them with smears but as far as anyone knows, the only private detectives hired to dig up dirt were those hired by Fox News’ parentcompany, NewsCorporation.

Do you like this post?

Showing 10 reactions

Bill O’Reilly joined the pile-on on Friday, this time trying to say that Brent Bozell has never attacked anyone. This is untrue. Brent Bozell’s group, the Parents Television Council, which is really an offshoot of his Media Research Center, got in trouble ten years ago for attacking WWE and saying that they were encouraging children to violence. The WWE sued Bozell’s PTC and got a 3.5 million dollar settlement. Bozell was also compelled to post a humiliating apology to the WWE to complete his discrediting.

Well, as most of their target audience has computers, and most of their target audience up until now has no idea what Media Matters is, well… thanks, Klannity… just gained MM some more readers! Well done! LOL